When does the Secret Santa Appeal take place?
General Public:
The Appeal takes place between Saturday 25th November 2023 and Sunday 10th December 2023.
Mini Appeals:
The Appeal takes place between 25th November 2023 and Friday 8th December 2023.
Unfortunately, we cannot accept any gifts after the above deadlines as they will be distributed to the charities and other organisations very shortly after this date to ensure delivery for Christmas.
How can I be involved?
Where and when can I donate a gift?
Do I need to take gifts with tags back to where I picked the tags up from?
Where can I drop off my gift(s)?
Can I arrange collection of my gifts?
What type of gift should I buy?
Should I wrap my gift?
We’ve collected more gifts than expected. What should we do?
Who do we collect gifts for?
I am from a charity and would be interested in receiving gifts. How can I get involved?
- You can donate a gift or run a Mini-Appeal in your workplace or organisation. Please see “Where and when can I donate a gift” for further details.
- You could donate a couple of hours of your time to help collect gifts at our Secret Santa stand in Kirkgate Shopping Centre in Bradford. Please email us at team@secretsantaappeal.org.uk if you would like to be involved.
- You could help spread the word using social media. Use twitter handles – @jcibradford and @secretsantajci, follow us on Instagram – secretsantaappeal, or like our Facebook page –www.facebook.com/secretsantaappeal.
Where and when can I donate a gift?
If you are interested running a Mini-Appeal, please complete our online registration form . You will then receive an email from the Secret Santa team by approximately mid-November with further details once we have received all our nominations from our charities.
If you are an individual wanting to buy a gift to donate, you can collect a tag from a Secret Santa tree at the following locations:
The Kirkgate Shopping Centre in Bradford. The stand will be open on Saturdays and Sundays between 11am and 4pm.
Eureka – The National Children’s Museum, Halifax – Tuesday to Sunday 10am – 4pm
Huddersfield – (NEW LOCATION) Yorkshire Children’s Centre, Charity Number 288125, Brian Jackson House, 2 New North Parade, Huddersfield HD1 5JP
Where can I drop off my gift(s)?
You can drop your gift at any of the Secret Santa locations listed below:-
The Kirkgate Shopping Centre in Bradford. The stand will be open on Saturdays and Sundays between 11am and 4pm. However, if you bring a gift in anytime that the Kirkgate is open and ask a member of security they will assist you by putting the gift in our secure storage facility.
Eureka – The National Children’s Museum, Halifax – Tuesday to Sunday 10am – 4pm
Huddersfield – (NEW LOCATION) Yorkshire Children’s Centre, Charity Number 288125, Brian Jackson House, 2 New North Parade, Huddersfield HD1 5JP
Please attach your tag to the gift. If you are bringing numerous gifts, please put your gifts in bin liners or bigger carrier bags. There will be a code on your tags and if you could identity this code on each bag, it would be much appreciated. The security team at the Kirkgate are often on hand to help if they are available, but please be prepared to carry your gifts and bring sufficient help with you.
If you are dropping off a large amount of gifts, we may be able to arrange for you to drop your gifts off via the deliveries entrance at Kirkgate Shopping Centre (opposite McDonalds). For security reasons you MUST register CLICK HERE to request access to drop off gifts providing contact info, date, time and your vehicle details. We will need notice of your request so that we can confirm this with the security team at Kirkgate.
Do I need to take gifts with tags back to where I picked the tags up from?
Yes please. If you collect a tag from Halifax it must be returned to the
Halifax collection/drop-off point. All gifts collected in the different areas such as Bradford, Calderdale and Kirklees go to help children in those specific areas.
Can I arrange collection of my gifts?
Unfortunately we cannot offer collection of gifts. The Secret Santa team are all volunteers who work full-time for other organisations. We instead offer a central drop-off point at the Kirkgate Shopping Centre in Bradford, please see details above.
What type of gift should I buy?
We ask that you kindly follow our donation guidelines.
For safeguarding reasons, we ask that all gifts are left unwrapped. The gifts can then be easily checked by the Secret Santa team and the relevant charities to ensure that they are appropriate. Any gifts that arrive wrapped will unfortunately need to be opened.
If you would like to donate any wrapping paper, we can pass this onto the charities and organisation so that they can wrap the gifts once checked.
We’ve collected more gifts than expected. What should we do?
That’s great news. If you manage to collect extra gifts, please kindly label these gifts if possible with a sticker stating an age and gender. We can then make sure they are allocated to charities with emergencies over Christmas.
If you are running a mini-appeal and have collected additional gifts please email the Secret Santa team at team@secretsantaappeal.org.uk to let us know your final numbers collected.
I am from a charity and would be interested in receiving gifts. How can I get involved?
We partner with a number of local charities and organisations that work with disadvantaged families, young people and children, but we are always interested in hearing from others that we may be able to help. Please complete our online registration form and we will contact you to discuss how we can help.
WE DO NOT HANDLE DIRECT REQUESTS FOR GIFTS FROM THE GENERAL PUBLIC
Who do we collect gifts for?
We only accept requests for gifts from charities and local authority agencies who work with disadvantaged families and children on a daily basis. The Secret Santa Appeal is fundamentally a secret appeal whereby families and their children hopefully do not know where the gifts come from.
If you have any further questions which are not answered above, please email team@secretsantaappeal.org.uk. Our team work full-time so may not be able to respond instantly, but someone will come back to you as soon as possible.